Beware of Chrome extensions hijacking your Amazon portal points

Introduction

Ever since The Jetblue Amazon portal launched, I haven’t gotten a single Jetblue point, and it’s odd because I’ know I’ve shopped through their numerous times.  I also know that Amazon tracks portals by items you add to cart, so I always had an empty cart, then clicked through portal, and then added item to cart and checked out.  For the past month, I was curious why every time I sent an Amazon link, it would always end with “&tag=wwwwarriorsof-20.”  Well, I finally did a Google search the other day and it turns out it was possibly due to a Chrome extension that was appending the tag.  That meant that that extension was getting credit for all the items I’ve bought on Amazon and also why Jetblue wasn’t paying me miles.

 

What extension was it?

I’m not quite sure, but I had disabled quite a few of them.  After I removed them, I noticed that the tag was no longer there.

 

The fix

You can type this into the URL bar – chrome://extensions/ and it should list all of your Chrome extensions.  Keep removing or disabling until the tag goes away.

 

Conclusion

I should have looked this up sooner since I’m sure it cost me at least 10,000 Jetblue points.  Shady ass Chrome extensions…

9 comments on “Beware of Chrome extensions hijacking your Amazon portal points

  1. There’s also a great extension called, “Amazon Tag Remover”. I have used it and it removes this guy wwwwarriorsof-20 and the other crap affiliate leeches out there. Thanks for your post!!

  2. What are you nuts? When you shop through ANY portal, you should open an Incognito window, and don’t allow any extensions to work in Incog (except one, if you use it: 1Password, so you can login).

    1. Was that necessary to call me nuts? No other shopping site/portal combo has this problem. The problem is the extension, not how I shop.

      1. I do my regular work in Chrome but any shopping or financial in Firefox where I dump cookies etc afterwards.

  3. It’s the FBA calculator extension. I even emailed the developer who of course ignored me. There’s a better extension anyways that calculates in a dropdown so you don’t need to load a new page, and it doesn’t have affiliate links either. I can’t find it on my laptop, but if you email me in a week we should be moved into the new place and I can tell you then.

    1. I think it was that extension, but didn’t want to call them out unless I was 100% sure. Assholes.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *